Beach Clean: Cambois 25th February 2017

The theme of this beach clean was dog poo. SO MUCH DOG POO.

For the past few months, we’ve been concentrating on one particular part of Cambois beach. This time, our local volunteers told us we should move to the Beach House car park as the recent tidal surge had caused a bit of chaos and there was lots of litter lying around. They weren’t wrong!

It All Started In The Car Park...

When we arrived, we were disgusted by what we found. The place was a mess. We spent about half an hour just around the vehicles, before we even headed down to the beach. There was evidence of fly tipping with household items like carpets, broken plant pots and nappies strewn across the verge. It had obviously been there a while as vegetation had started taking over in the amazing way that nature inevitably does.

The thing that annoyed our volunteers most of all was the sheer laziness of dog owners. The general “pick up after your dog” rule, for some inexplicable reason, must not apply to the car park and dunes – there was unbagged poo lying everywhere. There also appears to be a culture of “well, at least I didn’t leave it on the beach”. Dog owners pick up the poo on the beach, which is fantastic. But on returning to their cars, instead of walking the extra 20 meters to the bin on the far side of the bridge, they launch their festering bags skywards so it lands high up on the verge. We just can’t understand the logic and it certainly wasn’t pleasant picking up around 30 smelly bags.

To The Beach...

Happy that we’d made a massive difference to the car park and dunes, we headed down to the beach. This area is quite rocky, a stark contrast to the sandy areas of our usual Cambois spot. Tiny bits of plastic always find shelter in the rocks along the strandline where they can hide and cause a nuisance.

As usual, our Marine Conservation Society Beachwatch Survey found lots of bottles. straws and cotton bud sticks - single use, throwaway plastic items that litter our beaches. You can see the full results of our survey data here. All of the hard plastic items from the day were separated from the rest to be sent to Terra Cycle for recycling into special beach clean plastic items - 15kg will be heading to their office very soon! We also recycled 5.8kg of glass, and 4.5 kg of aluminium cans.

161kg In Total!

In total, including the trash from the car park, we removed a staggering 161kg in just over an hour! A lot of that weight was washed up metal and old cables, but it certainly kept us fit carrying it up the dunes to the van! Once again, a morning of fantastic work by our dedicated volunteers.

If you’d like to get involved in one of our beach cleans, check out our events page!